November 7, 2024

Thursday, November 7, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

The Vice President’s concession speech and statements.👇

Kamala Harris: "On the campaign, I would often say, 'when we fight, we win.' But here's the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. The important thing is don't ever give up.”

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Voices weighing in since the shocking results of Election Day.

Tim Walz.

President Biden.

The Obamas.

Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Liz Cheney.

Adam Kinzinger.

Melinda French Gates.

Kamala’s AKA Sorority Sisters.

Touch to hear. 👇

Andrew Weissmann.

A prominent German newspaper.

A prominent German magazine.

George Conway.

The owner of the Washington Post.

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The most important lesson learned from the Election Results.

Margaret Sullivan, “They saw him and said yes.”

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Don’t ignore the role gender played in our national fiasco.

Trump Offered Men Something That Democrats Never Could.

Trump offered women the same thing too, and both men and women bit.

I have long been afraid of the effect of what I call “silent misogyny” all through this election season. Kamala didn’t harp on or, for the most part, even mention her gender. It didn’t matter.

Gender, wrapped in race, is all some Americans saw.

Gender is one of the lens through which we, 21st century America males and females, see each other.

We are trained that way. The primary question people ask of a baby is - Is it a boy or a girl? This category, and certain others -race, age - are our guiding lights.

Even though some of us tap this down - try as some of us might, not one of us is seen as without gender. No one is only a “person.”

Gender’s importance as a primary organizational structure of American life explains why MAGA sees Non-Binary and LGBTQI+ people as threats. It also explains why MAGA was able to use Transgender people as an election battle cry.

Traditional maleness for many, especially when wrapped in crudeness and violence, remains the winning norm. It also often arrives with attendant misogyny. If a woman or a person of color gets ahead, she must be benefiting from DEI and have a “low I.Q.”

Trump deepened his relationship with masculinity many times in the last decade - even oddly enough by his crude remarks in the Access Hollywood tapes. Most recently, his declaration that he would “protect” women “even if they didn’t like it” simply reinforced his winning brand.

This op-ed 👇 describes the outcome of gender as a deeply ingrained American belief, as natural to our citizens as apple pie.

On the long road to Election Day, no group of voters was more loyal to Donald Trump than young white men. One early theory was that his success with this demographic was a result of male isolation and loneliness. But that showed a fundamental misunderstanding of Mr. Trump’s appeal. He did so well with male voters because he is a walking avatar of a kind of masculinity that Democrats could never embrace, and its appeal transcends this electoral cycle.

Mr. Trump offered a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.

The Trump campaign was channeling what psychologists call “hegemonic masculinity,” the belief that “good” men are dominant in hierarchies of power and status, that they are mentally and physically tough, that they must embody the opposite of anything feminine — and that this dominance over not just women but all less powerful groups is the natural order and what’s best for everyone.

A 2021 study by the psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn found that hegemonic masculinity was a better predictor of whether people saw Mr. Trump as a good leader in 2016 and 2020 than sexism or racism alone. It was a better predictor than trust in government or even party affiliation.

Mr. Trump’s rally speeches were rambling, but they expressed this worldview consistently and constantly. I don’t believe it was strategic; Mr. Trump himself has always venerated power and status for their own sake, dominance over women and hostility toward minorities. He has always referred to himself as the toughest, the best, the strongest, the most, the winner. He was just being himself.

When he wanted to insult his enemies he identified them by qualities that the rules of hegemonic masculinity code as feminine: less intelligent (“low-I.Q.” Robert DeNiro), feminized (“Tampon Tim” Walz), weak (“sleepy Joe”). If the enemy was a woman, he described her through a lens of sexuality or motherhood, because for him that’s a woman’s primary value to men. So it’s no surprise that he painted Ms. Harris as “low-I.Q.” and “lazy” and gleefully suggested that she slept her way to the top.

You could hear it all when Tucker Carlson invited a crowd to imagine how preposterous it would be for Ms. Harris to claim victory. “She got 85 million votes,” he said sarcastically, “because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Mr. Trump has made this kind of open bigotry acceptable for Republicans, and it’s not going to just disappear before the next election cycle.

Professionally successful, non-childbearing women can look like a threat, both to the men who adhere to these ideals and to the hierarchy that enables the men to justify their status and power. For men who feel displaced, accusing women and minorities of benefiting from an unfair advantage, demanding that their supposedly ill-gotten gains be rolled back and their subordinate position restored, might be an appealing option. It’s one that the Trump campaign encouraged at every turn.

There’s an irony to this, in that actual systems of advantage — inherited wealth, legacy admissions to elite colleges, nepotistic professional advancement — were all designed to benefit white men. Perhaps no one embodies this unearned privilege better than Mr. Trump, but the ideological framework he operates in does not allow for acknowledging it. Instead, its beneficiaries insist that the rest of the world contort itself into a reactionary power structure.

Connect the dots — the snide insults and the brotastic podcasts and the attack on reproductive rights and the emphasis on natalism — and you get a world in which women are told to drop out of the labor force and attend to domestic matters, making themselves sexually available (but only to their husbands), producing children and supporting their husband’s career, regardless of the effect on their work, time and happiness.

Some observers faulted Ms. Harris for not doing enough to accommodate a regressive view of masculinity, suggesting that she could have picked up some votes by, say, proposing military service as a cure for male alienation, or by avoiding reasonable critiques of sexism because they might make some men feel like they’re being attacked. But prescriptions like these only reinforce hegemonic masculinity, and that is incompatible with a vision for America where the needs and interests of women and minorities are not valued less than those of white men.

It is not the responsibility of women to convince men of our humanity, abilities and potential. But the view of masculinity that Mr. Trump appeals to harms men, too, offering appealingly simple answers that ultimately leave their adherents that much more isolated. (Op-ed by Elizabeth Spiers, New York Times)

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Good news.

Take it where you find it.

Trump won, but so did seven ballot measures protecting abortion rights.

Ten states had referendums on reproductive freedom.

“Yes on 3” signs are displayed outside of the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom office on October 26, 2024.

Americans in 10 states cast votes on ballot measures to protect or expand abortion access, and in seven, the measures for abortion rights won. That brings the total to 13 states approving abortion rights referendums since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

Ballot proposals sailed through on Tuesday not only in blue states like New York and Maryland, but also in red and purple states like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Montana. Missouri, which was the first state to completely ban abortion after Roe fell, is now the first state to overturn a ban. All told, the pro-abortion rights measures passed on Tuesday will expand access for millions of women of reproductive age who live in those states, as well as thousands of others traveling from more restrictive areas for care.

The biggest loss of the night was undoubtedly in Florida, where advocates had raised more than $100 million to reverse the state’s near-total ban on abortion. The ban, which took effect this past spring, has decimated access not only for residents living in the third most populous state but also for people across the South who had been traveling to Florida since Roe was overturned. While a majority of Florida voters backed the proposal, which would have restored abortion rights up to the point of fetal viability — typically between 22 and 24 weeks of a pregnancy — Florida law requires at least 60 percent of voters to approve a ballot measure to pass.

This 60 percent “supermajority” threshold is simply a high bar for any referendum, and Florida’s earned 57 percent. Of all the winning abortion rights ballot measures that have passed in red or purple states since Roe’s overturn, none have reached that 60 percent level. In 2023, Republican lawmakers tried to raise Ohio’s ballot measure threshold to 60 percent precisely to make it harder for a pending abortion rights proposal to pass, and voters rejected the move. Ohio voters ultimately approved their abortion rights measure by 57 percent.

The other losses Tuesday night were in red states, like Nebraska, where voters were confronted with two (intentionally confusing) constitutional measures, and South Dakota, where reproductive rights groups didn’t help campaign for a ballot measure that would have overturned the state’s total ban. The ballot measure failed. (Vox)

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Shameful information, and a bit more.

2024 US elections takeaways: how female voters broke for Harris and Trump.

Gender had promised to be one of the biggest stories of the 2024 election. With abortion one of voters’ top issues, Donald Trump’s well-documented history of misogyny and a female presidential candidate of color on the ballot, Democrats banked on women showing up in force to defeat him. But Trump’s stunning victory in both the electoral college and the popular vote dashed those hopes – and scrambled the narrative around how gender, race and other markers of identity informed Americans’ votes.

Based on available exit polling, which remains preliminary, here are five early takeaways on how gender shaped the 2024 elections.

1. Women voted for the Democratic candidate, but by smaller margins

Women did indeed show up to support Kamala Harris, but in smaller numbers than her Democratic predecessors. While Hillary Clinton won women by 13 points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 15 in 2020, Harris secured them by just 10 points, CNN found.

1. White women are still voting for the Republican candidate Although women as a whole have historically voted for Democrats, white women have not. Instead, over the last 72 years, a plurality of white women have voted for the Democratic candidate only twice, in 1964 and 1996. On Tuesday, they once again went for Trump – just as they did in 2016 and 2020. But Harris made inroads with the group; she lost them by only 5 points, according to CNN. (In 2020, they broke for Trump by 11.) More surprisingly, Trump’s lead among white men also shrank, from 23 points in 2020 to 20 in 2024.

2. Trump did better with young women than he did in 2020 The Trump campaign leaned into targeting young men, as the former president publicly palled around with male YouTubers and podcasters, such as Joe Rogan, who make little space for women. This effort paid off: exit polling indicates that there was a canyon-wide 16-point gender gap between young men and women, which is an increase from 2020. While women between the ages of 18 and 29 preferred Harris 58% to 40%, their male peers chose Trump 56% to 42%. However, compared to his last run, Trump did better with both young men (41% of them voted for him four years ago) and young women (33% in 2020).

3. Harris suffered significant losses among both Latino women and men

Latino men, in particular, veered hard to the right. In 2016, Clinton won Latino men by 31 points; by 2020, their support for Democrats had cooled somewhat, as Biden won them by 23 points. On Tuesday, Trump won this group handily, by 10 points, according to exit polling performed for the Washington Post and other outlets. Meanwhile, Harris won Latina women by 24 points, a victory that pales in comparison to Clinton’s 44-point lead in 2024.

1. Black women are the most reliable Democratic voters

Long the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters, Black women are still the backbone of the Democratic party. Harris won them by 85 points – a bigger lead than any other gendered and racial group measured by CNN. Apart from the contest for president, Delaware and Maryland both elected Black women, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks, to the Senate – making the next Senate the first one in which two Black women will simultaneously serve together. (The Guardian).

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What to expect from Trump.

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Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.

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